AKS standards for Azure Kubernetes Service. It is an Azure cloud managed fully-featured Kubernetes cluster service. In AKS, there are system node pools and user node pools. System node pools host the AKS infrastructure components, i.e. the control plane components of the Kubernetes cluster, such as the API server. User node pools host the customer containerized workloads in node pools which essentially are Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Each node pool comprises one ore more nodes (VMs) and each node hosts one or more pods. Each pod corresponds to one or more application containers. The AKS cluster also includes various other Azure utility services, such as Azure load balancer, Azure Key Vault and Azure Container Registry (ACR).
